Nora Kennedy

Muse to George Mackay Brown

Eleonora Berger, jeweller: born Vienna 3 December 1936; married 1967 Donald Kennedy; died Kirkwall 14 August 2007.

During the heat-wave summer of 1976, Nora Kennedy, a jeweller and silversmith, moved to Orkney. There, she met the island poet George Mackay Brown. They embarked on what was, for Brown, the first and only full-blown love affair of his life. At 55, he found the experience both wonderful and painful – "a curious kind of rack of flowers to be stretched out on, so late in the day".

Born Eleonora Berger in Vienna in 1936, she was an only child whose parents combined Hungarian, German, Austrian and Czech ancestry. Her father, a chauvinist inclined to cruelty, ran a workshop manufacturing automobile parts.

Nora's early childhood was overshadowed by the Second World War, during which her parents divorced, and by the Nazi occupation of Vienna. She retained vivid memories of the arrival of the Red Army in the city in 1945. With her mother, she had taken refuge from the fighting in a house in the Vienna woods. Both narrowly escaped death at the hands of a band of teenage Russian soldiers, who, wrongly suspecting them of Nazi collaboration, forced entrance and opened fire.

The return of her father, who had spent the war fighting abroad, brought neither comfort nor security. He celebrated his release from army life by ordering his mother to kill and cook Nora's pet rabbit.

Nora showed artistic gifts from an early age. She read widely, and one of the favourite pastimes of her solitary childhood was to act out Schiller plays on her mother's lawn. At 16, she won a scholarship to the Art Academy in Vienna, where she studied for two years before training as an enameller and jeweller, a craft she pursued intermittently for the rest of her life.

In her mid-twenties, she met Donald Kennedy, an Edinburgh Scot who had come to work for her father. Their marriage, in 1967, was followed by a number of happy years, during which they travelled widely. Though they remained close for the rest of their lives, however, they were, by the mid-Seventies, living largely apart. Nora moved from Edinburgh to the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay, where she bought and renovated a cottage.

She first met George Mackay Brown in the bar of the Royal Hotel in Stromness. He had been suffering from a prolonged bout of depression, and from agoraphobia so severe that he was sometimes unable to leave his flat. His whole appearance gave Nora an impression of fragility, and she felt protective towards him.

Brown, meanwhile, sensed in Nora Kennedy a kindred spirit. A poet's art, he believed, was very like a jeweller's; and, after months of imprisonment by agoraphobia, the company of a dark, attractive, intelligent young Austrian woman without Orkney roots was refreshing. Nineteen seventy-six was the hottest summer of the 20th century. Casting aside his rigid work routine, Brown began to visit Nora daily on South Ronaldsay. "It was," she recalled, "like falling into a dream."

George Mackay Brown had been in love with women before, most notably with Stella Cartwright, the "Rose Street Muse" to whom he had been briefly engaged as a mature student in Edinburgh. While he seems to have been unable to consummate his relationship with Stella, however, with Nora things were different. "You have taken me into regions where I never thought to go," he wrote to her. "I am half-enchanted, half-afraid."

In the short term, the effects were creative. As the heat-wave passed and autumn settled on the islands, Brown returned to work with an energy he had been lacking for some years. Poetry flowed from his pen. "I am writing for you," he told Nora, "and that seems to raise me to new heights."

It was not long, however, before the relationship began to prove a source of anguish for them both. Nora Kennedy became upset by and resentful of Brown's single-minded devotion to his work, a devotion which he found impossible to reconcile with her almost fathomless need for attention and reassurance. "Do not expect a kind of love I am not capable of giving to anyone," he was writing by the spring of 1977. "Perhaps that supreme thing is kept from many writers and artists: 'the muse' demands all that there is. . ."

As the strain began to tell, Brown was plunged again into a depression so severe that he felt the foundations of his mind were becoming unhinged, and that he was going mad. He feared that he and Nora might grow to hate each other, and because she was so dear to him this thought was terrifying.

His fear was not realised. Brown never ceased to feel tenderness for Nora Kennedy, nor she for him, and, though their physical affair was short-lived, their friendship persisted until Brown's death in 1996.

The legacy of this friendship is a wealth of very fine poetry. Brown's 1983 collection Voyages, dedicated to Nora, reflects both the consolation and the desolation that their relationship brought him. In some poems he celebrates love; in others he dwells for comfort on the briefness of life. And in the very best – like "Countryman" – he manages to do both:

Come soon. Break from the pure ring of silence,

A swaddled wail

You venture

With jotter and book and pencil to school

An ox man, you turn

Black pages on the hill

Whisper a vow

To the long white sweetness under blessing and

bell

A full harvest,

Utterings of gold at the mill

Old yarns, old malt, beside the hearth,

A breaking of ice at the well

Be silent, story, soon.

You did not take long to tell

Maggie Fergusson